If you allow people to behave badly, bad behaviour is what you’ll get - the
Duggan inquest bears this out

The scenes at the Mark Duggan inquest, in which supporters of the deceased threatened the jurors with violence, were the predictable outcome of a decreasing public appreciation that courts are supposed to dispense impersonal justice, not group psychotherapy by means of the ventilation of feelings. Such feelings are not their own justification. Even when they are justified, we should keep them under control.

The Duggan case was at the extreme end of a continuum that has shifted in the direction of intimidation and violence. As a prison doctor, I was once ushered out of a coroners’ court by the back door – by the usher. He told me he had to do this increasingly often, because the upset relatives of the deceased were issuing threats against witnesses such as me.

In that case, a man had died as a result of his own prolonged misconduct. I had warned him of its inevitable outcome, but he had paid no heed. In the end he had died, as I said he would. The relatives blamed me, though no possible blame attached. They subjected me, in the witness box, to a barrage of menacing insults and the coroner allowed them to. His verdict did not find any of their complaints justified.

Why had he allowed such disgraceful conduct? No doubt it was partly cowardice; the family was clearly not a respectable one. But he might also have had the sentimental idea that the bereaved ought, in the supposed extremity of their grief, to be excused an insult or two – or a hundred. We are all subject to stress, after all, and say things we don’t mean at times of high emotion. He also probably subscribed to the cod-psychotherapeutic notion that if he did not allow them to express themselves, they would behave even worse than they did.

In fact the opposite is the case. If you allow people to behave badly, bad behaviour is what you’ll get; indeed, general standards of conduct will decline, even among those who were formerly well behaved. The worst people will, with their natural cunning, draw the conclusion that they can conduct themselves with impunity. The Duggan inquest bears them out.

Related Articles

Not long ago, I gave evidence in a trial in which a man of subnormal intelligence was accused of a sexual assault of a minor kind, possibly the result of genuine incomprehension. As he was led into the dock, the complainant’s boyfriend, who himself looked no uncompromising defender of law and order, uttered a threat from the public gallery that was heard by all, including barristers and police (the judge had not yet entered). Nothing was done. In the very temple of justice, a man had issued an illegal threat with total impunity. As if in ironic commentary, at the entrance to the next-door courtroom, police in bulletproof vests patrolled with automatic weapons. That this should now be necessary is hardly surprising.

The observance of a moment’s silence for Duggan before the proceedings in the coroners’ court was an instance of authority paying “respect”, in the sense of fear of thuggery. Authority thus paid the Danegeld and, as a natural consequence, did not get rid of the Dane. Such intimidation, incidentally, explains the absurd and dangerous conclusions of the Macpherson Report, perhaps the most striking instance of moral cowardice and intellectual incompetence in the history of British public inquiries.

There is a very revealing contrast between the behaviour of the Duggan family and that of the Hanratty family 50 years ago. James Hanratty was one of the last men to be hanged in Britain, and from the first there were doubts about his guilt. It now seems almost certain that he was guilty, but at the time, on the evidence presented, a verdict of “not guilty” would have been perfectly reasonable, and indeed safer.

Hanratty’s parents and brother devoted years, indeed decades, to trying to prove that there had been a miscarriage of justice. Whether Hanratty was guilty or not, their conduct was always dignified. They did not let their outrage – justified if Hanratty were innocent – boil over into illegal, threatening or violent behaviour. Emotion did not yet trump reason.